RATIONALE, AIMS, AND OBJECTIVES: In this study, we have attempted to replicate the findings of altered emotional processing in depressed patients compared with healthy controls by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging during passive viewing of positive, negative, and neutral pictures from the International Affective Pictures System. METHODS: Nineteen medicated depressed patients and 19 sex and age-matched healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during presentation of affective pictures in a block design...

The study of fear extinction represents an important example of translational neuroscience in psychiatry and promises to improve the understanding and treatment of anxiety and fear-related disorders. We present the results of a set of meta-analyses of human fear extinction studies in healthy participants, conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and reporting whole-brain results. Meta-analyses of fear extinction learning primarily implicate consistent activation of brain regions linked to threat appraisal and experience, including the dorsal anterior cingulate and anterior insular cortices...

Brain activity derives from intrinsic dynamics (due to neurophysiology and anatomical connectivity) in concert with stochastic effects that arise from sensory fluctuations, brainstem discharges, and random microscopic states such as thermal noise. The dynamic evolution of systems composed of both dynamic and random fluctuations can be studied with stochastic dynamic models (SDMs). This article, Part II of a two-part series, reviews applications of SDMs to large-scale neural systems in health and disease. Stochastic models have already elucidated a number of pathophysiological phenomena, such as epilepsy and hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, although their use in biological psychiatry remains rather nascent...

Ranchi Institute of Neuro-Psychiatry and Allied Sciences (RINPAS; Ranchi Indian Mental Hospital; Ranchi Manasik Aryogyashala) traces its origin from a lunatic asylum for Indian soldiers established at Munghyr in Bihar in 1795 and thus is the first mental hospital in India established by the British purely for Indian patients as well as the second oldest functioning mental hospital in India. The hospital made great strides in improving patients care and using modern methods of assessment and treatment as well as education and research during the tenure of Dr J E Dhunjibhoy the first Indian medical superintendent...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Humoral autoimmunity has gained highest interest in neurology and psychiatry. Despite numerous recent articles on this hot topic, however, the biological significance of natural autoantibodies (AB) and the normal autoimmune repertoire of mammals remained quite obscure. AB may contribute to disorder-relevant phenotypes and are even believed to induce diseases themselves, but the circumstances under which AB become pathogenic are not fully understood. This review will focus on the highly frequent AB against the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor 1 (NMDAR1-AB) as an illustrating example and provide a critical overview of current work (please note that the new nomenclature, GluN1, is disregarded here for consistency with the AB literature)...

LSD is one of the most potent psychoactive agents known, producing dramatic alterations of consciousness after submilligram (≥20 g) oral doses. Following the accidental discovery of its potent psychoactive effects in 1943, it was supplied by Sandoz Laboratories as an experimental drug that might be useful as an adjunct for psychotherapy, or to give psychiatrists insight into the mental processes in their patients. The finding of serotonin in the mammalian brain in 1953, and its structural resemblance to LSD, quickly led to ideas that serotonin in the brain might be involved in mental illness, initiating rapid research interest in the neurochemistry of serotonin...

INTRODUCTION: Trichotillomania and trichotillophagia can result in huge intraluminal coagulations of hair. Rarely, these can present with gastric perforation. This work has been reported in line with the SCARE criteria (Agha et al., 2016) [1]. PRESENTATION OF CASE: We report the case of a 15 year old girl who attended the emergency department with abdominal pain and vomiting. Ultrasound abdomen and pelvis identified free fluid within the pelvis concerning for inflammatory bowel disease...

Jacob et al. (2011) previously reported on intimate picture stimuli for emotion research in females in Psychiatry Research. Difficulties to engage in intimate relations constitute problems of many mental disorders, and intimacy must be differentiated from pure sex drive. Functional neuroimaging is an important tool to understand the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. We now studied cerebral activation in response to intimate stimuli in 35 healthy women. Comparison stimuli were taken from the International Affective Picture System...

Human brain imaging can help improve our understanding of mechanisms underlying brain function and how they drive behavior in health and disease. Such knowledge may eventually help us to devise better treatments for psychiatric disorders. However, the brain imaging literature in psychiatry and especially eating disorders has been inconsistent, and studies are often difficult to replicate. The extent or severity of extremes of eating and state of illness, which are often associated with differences in, for instance hormonal status, comorbidity, and medication use, commonly differ between studies and likely add to variation across study results...

In this article we explore how diagnostic and therapeutic technologies shape the lived experiences of illness for patients. By analysing a wide range of examples, we identify six ways that technology can (trans)form the experience of illness (and health). First, technology may create awareness of disease by revealing asymptomatic signs or markers (imaging techniques, blood tests). Second, the technology can reveal risk factors for developing diseases (e.g., high blood pressure or genetic tests that reveal risks of falling ill in the future)...

BACKGROUND: Diagnosing and treating anorexia nervosa is an important challenge for modern psychiatry. Taking into account a connection between the mental state of a person and the characteristics of their language, this paper presents developed and tested method for analyzing the written statements of patients with anorexia nervosa and healthy individuals, including the identification of keywords. METHODS: Due to the short nature of the texts, which is related to the difficulty of expressing oneself about one's body when suffering from anorexia, the bag of words approach was used for documents' information representation...

Despite the success of modern neuroimaging techniques in furthering our understanding of cognitive and pathophysiological processes, translation of these advances into clinically relevant tools has been virtually absent until now. Neuromodeling represents a powerful framework for overcoming this translational deadlock, and the development of computational models to solve clinical problems has become a major scientific goal over the last decade, as reflected by the emergence of clinically oriented neuromodeling fields like Computational Psychiatry, Computational Neurology, and Computational Psychosomatics...

INTRODUCTION: A main determinant of professional identity is the integrity of the discipline. The complexity of psychiatry in biological, psychological and sociological aspects is a typical instance of the necessity for integration. AIM: Based on the bio-psycho-social dimensions and on their opinion about acceptance of psychiatry, we explored the professional identities of physicians working in Hungarian contemporary psychiatry. METHOD: Voluntary, anonymous responses were collected by using a 10-point evaluation scale on professional attitude, appreciation of psychiatry from lay society and other medical professions, and the importance of biology, psychology and sociology within psychiatry...

BACKGROUND: Different pharmacologic agents are used in the treatment of paraphilic disorders in sexual offenders or men with a risk of sexual offending, with luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists being the agents introduced more recently to treatment regimens. AIM: To summarize the relevant literature concerning LHRH agonist treatment of paraphilic disorders in sexual offenders and update the previously published systematic review by Briken et al (J Clin Psychiatry 2003;64:890-897)...

BACKGROUND: Real world data have an important role to play in the evaluation of epidemiology and burden of disease; and in assisting health-care decision-makers, especially related to coverage and payment decisions. However, there is currently no overview of the existing longitudinal real world data sources in Parkinson's disease (PD) in the USA. Such an assessment can be very helpful, to support a future effort to harmonize real world data collection and use the available resources in an optimal way...

After World War II came to an end, General Franco's regime attempted to step aside from the defeated fascist states by emphasizing its Catholic character. The change of image culminated in 1947 with the establishment of Spain as a Catholic State by means of the Law of Succession. This process generated the national catholic ideology, which became, during the first decades of the dictatorship, the hegemonic instrument for the transformation of Spanish society in an anti-modernizing way. Scientific activity was not excluded from these changes, and a Catholic science conveying universal values and in harmony with the faith was strongly encouraged...

Stress is a well-established trigger for a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, as it alters both structure and function of several brain regions and its networks. Herein, we conduct a longitudinal neuroimaging study to assess how a chronic unpredictable stress protocol impacts the structure of the rat brain and its functional connectome in both high and low responders to stress. Our results reveal the changes that stress triggers in the brain, with structural atrophy affecting key regions such as the prelimbic, cingulate, insular and retrosplenial, somatosensory, motor, auditory and perirhinal/entorhinal cortices, the hippocampus, the dorsomedial striatum, nucleus accumbens, the septum, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, the thalamus and several brain stem nuclei...

Working memory (WM) is a central construct in cognitive neuroscience because it comprises mechanisms of active information maintenance and cognitive control that underpin most complex cognitive behavior. Individual variation in WM has been associated with multiple behavioral and health features including demographic characteristics, cognitive and physical traits and lifestyle choices. In this context, we used sparse canonical correlation analyses (sCCAs) to determine the covariation between brain imaging metrics of WM-network activation and connectivity and nonimaging measures relating to sensorimotor processing, affective and nonaffective cognition, mental health and personality, physical health and lifestyle choices derived from 823 healthy participants derived from the Human Connectome Project...

A great deal of interest in psychiatric research is currently centered upon the pathogenic role of inflammatory processes. Positron emission tomography (PET) using radiolabeled ligands selective for the 18 kDa translocator protein (TSPO) has become the most widely used technique to assess putative neuroimmune abnormalities in vivo. Originally used to detect discrete neurotoxic damages, TSPO has generally turned into a biomarker of 'neuroinflammation' or 'microglial activation'. Psychiatric research has mostly accepted these denotations of TSPO, even if they may be inadequate and misleading under many pathological conditions...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a symptom cluster of intrusion, avoidance, negative alteration in cognition, and alteration in arousal and reactivity following trauma. PTSD occurs frequently after a physical trauma such as a severe hand injury. It is often not recognized and consequently untreated. Previous research has shown that 10%-40% of civilian trauma survivors experience PTSD in the first 12 months after injury. There is great urgency to identify patients in the early stage of recovery from trauma, as PTSD becomes more difficult to treat in its chronic form...